Manufacturers frequently employ independent transportation carriers to deliver raw materials from vendor cites to manufacturing sites on an as-needed basis. Traditionally, manufacturers themselves monitor on-site inventory levels and product usage rates, and, when material supplies become low, a phone call is placed from the plant site to an outside vendor to order another shipment of raw materials. Typically, a transportation carrier is separately contracted with to pick up the raw material order from the vendor site and deliver the shipment to the manufacturer.
Raw material inventories must-be continuously monitored and raw material orders and shipments must be carefully coordinated to ensure a sufficient amount of materials are always at hand. If material supplies are exhausted before new material shipments can be delivered, manufacturers may be forced to temporarily shut down manufacturing operations, resulting in lost production time and revenues.
When several raw materials are simultaneously used in product manufacturing, the task of monitoring material levels becomes increasingly difficult. An additional challenge is presented when the usage rate for each of these materials fluctuates over time.
In the case of dry bulk goods such as lime, coal and ash, for example, specially adapted trucks and trailers are often required for transporting the materials from a vendor to a plant site. In order to ensure the availability of a transport carrier when a material shipment is needed, it is desirable to schedule shipments as far in advance as possible. Thus, the ability to monitor existing material levels as well as to project future material requirements is critical. Likewise, the ability to quickly convey this information to a transport carrier is essential.
Several automated systems have been designed to facilitate the management of material inventories. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,727,164—Kaye et al. discloses an inventory management system wherein a centralized inventory database can be remotely accessed to retrieve information.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,761,362—Cowe et al. discloses an inventory monitoring system wherein electronic shelf units automatically monitor product inventory levels.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,983,198, issued to Mowery, et al., provides a system and method for using a fleet of vehicles to provide material to a plurality of tanks at various customer locations. An inventory indicator associated with each of the tanks provides a quantity signal to the central station indicating the quantity and temperature of each of the tanks. A processor at the central station monitors the quantity signals of each of the tanks to determine past usage rates of the contents of each of the tanks. The processor projects future tank quantities based on the past usage pattern and determines possible routes for each of the vehicles to each of the tanks. The processor optimizes the routes, delivery amounts, and delivery schedule to minimize total delivered cost for the products based on the projected future tank levels and the possible routes to dispatch each of the vehicles. Each of the foregoing systems allow some form of remote access to a centralized database to monitor inventory levels.
While these systems enable material stores to be remotely monitored, they are not useful for monitoring dry bulk goods nor do they provide means to interpret usage trends or project usage rates based on archived data.
What is needed is an automated system capable of continuously monitoring material levels for dry bulk goods as well as projecting future usage rates for materials based on archived data. Preferably, the system would provide for the automated transmittal of data to a remote site at predetermined time intervals.